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Travis Fife: Minerva Project reinvents classroom model, universities should take note

By Travis Fife

Sept. 2, 2014 12:00 a.m.

What’s really shocking about universities isn’t how much they’ve changed. It’s how much they’ve stayed the same.

Think about the typical classroom: There’s a professor lecturing, a group of students taking notes and maybe a graduate student or two there helping the professor.

Thomas Aquinas used this model in 13th century Paris, and every teacher I’ve had at UCLA has used it to varying degrees. While I doubt Aquinas had Microsoft PowerPoint, the basic tenets of the structure of a university-level class have remained stagnant. On the contrary, almost every other aspect of a student’s daily life has changed radically after technological developments in the 21st century.

This fall, however, one school hopes to reconceptualize the stock university model. The Minerva Schools at Keck Graduate Institute, welcoming their first class of students this fall, are in some ways modeled after an elite liberal arts college. But unlike the Ivy League schools it will compete with, Minerva will only offer online discussion-based classes. There’s no lecturing, classes are capped at 19 students, and fewer than one-fifth of the entering freshmen are from the United States.

While the past few years have seen a large rise in the number of available massive open online courses and universities continue to expand their online education programs, universities like UCLA should look to Minerva as an example of how to use technology in the classroom more efficiently.

This means recognizing that Minerva is operating in ways radically different from almost any other university, online or otherwise. Instead of posting online lectures, it uses computers to administer poll questions and force students to defend their answers or divide students into teams for debates. Minerva won’t have a physical campus and instead will have students live in dorms in several countries across their four years.

Given the University of California system has slowed down its pursuit of online education, with UC President Janet Napolitano calling it a “tool for the toolbox” rather than a “silver bullet,” the UC could look toward Minerva’s strategy as inspiration for new ideas for online education initiatives.

Minerva’s global vision was developed by Ben Nelson, a 39-year-old entrepreneur who started the project because of his dissatisfaction with his own college experience. He’s even said in news coverage of the school that the freshman year as it exists in traditional schools should be changed or done away with because of all the focus on general, surface-level material. Minerva’s vision for education is more efficient – the schools want to get away from anything they don’t see as contributing to student learning.

It doesn’t take much observation in your average lecture hall to recognize why the Minerva model might be appealing. A typical college classroom is a sea of laptop screens open not to notes or PowerPoint slides, but to Facebook. This is largely because lectures inherently entail a professor talking at a group of students who are expected to listen. But this does little to ensure each student is engaged with the material and provides even less room for discussion or debate.

Additionally, the availability of information lessens the need for information-based lectures. Aquinas had to lecture in large part because information simply wasn’t as readily available. Now information is available in seconds in the form of databases, search engines and a whole host of other mediums.

The availability of information doesn’t render lectures totally obsolete. But it could give professors the freedom to spend less time relaying information and more time teaching students how to work with the information available to them. For example, some political science game theory classes at UCLA have students participate in an online game and then use the data gathered as part of the class discussion. So, maybe rather than having a 50-minute discussion section for students to “discuss” a week’s worth of material, lectures could be better organized in favor of interactive online sessions.

In this regard, Minerva has taken several steps ahead. By substituting lectures with online discussion-based seminars, the professors are able to create a classroom that focuses on students’ engagement with the course material rather than the presentation of information.

Nelson is right that colleges can teach more efficiently. But this system ignores the fact that one of the biggest reasons to attend a university is face-to-face interaction with professors and graduate students. It’s hard to put a finger on what is lost when you place a computer screen between teacher and student. However, being able to occupy the same space as the people teaching you, seeing how they react to what you say and physically being in their offices all help establish a sort of intellectual relationship between you and your teachers. It’s the difference between using Skype with your parents from school and seeing them in person during break.

So what we can learn from the Minerva Project isn’t that we should scrap the brick-and-mortar university model completely, but rather that learning and teaching can mean something radically different in the 21st century. Considering how quickly technology has developed since the turn of the century and how much the world has changed because of it, universities will inevitably have to follow. Minerva is recognizing this change and taking it to the extreme.

The question for UCLA, then, isn’t how many online courses to offer, but what it means to be a university in the 21st century.

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